Chekmarev-Kamenev House

The Chekmarev-Kamenev House stands along the red line of Karl Marx Street in Kazan’s historic center, within the protected zone of the Kremlin ensemble. This two-story stone building is one of the few surviving works by provincial architect Vasily Kaftyrev: it was he who, in 1768, obtained Catherine II’s approval of the regular city development plan that shaped Kazan’s appearance for decades to come; the house is officially dated to 1775.

A study of the façades showed that the building actually predates the city’s regular replanning: on the corner of what are now Karl Marx and Yapeyev streets, a three-window stone structure already stood before 1774, its brickwork made of large-format bricks characteristic of the turn of the 17th–18th centuries — no more than a dozen such buildings survive in Kazan. Rather than demolish the old structure, Kaftyrev carefully incorporated it into the new regular block, symmetrically extending the street façade to seven window bays and adding rooms with barrel vaults.

The corners of the main façade are rusticated with horizontal banding, and the windows are decorated with elaborately patterned surrounds. Inside, wrought-iron fittings for shutters have survived — on the ground floor mounted from the inside, on the second floor from the outside — confirming the authenticity of the earlier sections of brickwork. From 1774 to 1806 the house belonged to the family of General’s wife Velikopolskaya, and its appearance fully matched Kaftyrev’s vision of uniformity for Kazan’s upper streets.

In 1806 the building was purchased by the First Kazan Gymnasium, which had by then separated from the university: it housed the gymnasium’s infirmary along with apartments for the overseer and supervisors, while the basement held kitchens and barracks. The fire of 1815, which destroyed almost all of Kazan, altered the house’s appearance — its distinctive Kaftyrev-style surrounds with “ears” disappeared, replaced by stricter Classicist inter-floor bands, and an annex appeared on the Yapeyev Street side. From 1836, clergy of the gymnasium church lived in the adjacent wing.

After the revolution the buildings were nationalized, and the gymnasium was reorganized into a Soviet labor school. By presidential decree in 1995, the house, together with the neighboring Admiralty complex, was granted the status of a protected monument of national significance. By the early 2000s, the building — by then used by a Protestant educational institution — had deteriorated so badly that cracks had spread across its façade. In 2012 the monument was transferred to the investment group ASG under a public-private partnership: façade restoration has been completed, while interior work continues.

Today the Chekmarev-Kamenev House remains a rare witness to Kazan’s pre-Petrine and early Classicist architecture, having survived changes of ownership, a major city fire, and nearly a century serving as the gymnasium’s educational and medical building. Its façade is one of the few authentic examples of Kaftyrev’s work, which shaped the appearance of the city’s upper streets for two and a half centuries to come.